1. © File copyright Colin Purrington. You may use for making your poster, of course, but please do not plagiarize, adapt, or put on your own site. Also, do not upload this file, even if modified, to third-party file-sharing sites such as doctoc.com. If you have insatiable need to post a template onto your own site, search the internet for a different template to steal. File downloaded from http://colinpurrington.com/tips/acade mic/posterdesign. Resilience policy Community resilience, the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events, is a key policy issue. Policy priorities are: public-private partnerships, critical infrastructure, lifelines, cybersecurity, interoperability, supply chains. Priorities don’t address human-environment system resilience. Putting resilience into practice requires scientific indicators and metrics. What do indicators show? Indicators proposed by scientists and practitioners tell us more about socioeconomic and biophysical vulnerability to disasters and community capacity than they do about recovery outcomes. They focus on infrastructure more so than ecosystems. Acknowledgements Many thanks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the opportunity to be a Science and Technology Policy Fellow; and to Tonya Nichols, Peter Jutro, and the National Homeland Security Research Center at EPA for supporting this research. Photo credits clockwise from top left: FEMA David Fine, FEMA Patsy Lynch, Corporation for National and Community Service. Moving forward Operationalize resilience Communities. Identify endpoints, core values, and assets for resilience planning. Scientists. Field test resilience indicators and metrics. Government agencies. Incorporate human-environment system approach to hazard resilience. Policy challenges Expand priorities to address more system variables. Improve institutions’ adaptive capacity to face uncertainty. Pay attention to power dynamics to minimize negative externalities and navigate trade-offs. Scientific challenges Design research for dynamic human-environment systems with nonlinear feedbacks to multiple stressors. Obtain metrics data that are robust and relevant, as well as accessible and meaningful to communities. Measure baseline conditions and recovery trajectories. Identify variations in resilience to different hazards. Keely Maxwell, AAAS Fellow EPA National Homeland Security Research Center Research methods & literature Surveyed academic and policy literature. Analyzed indicators and metrics using human-environment system models. Identified federal, state, and local data sources for scientific and community use. Adger, W.N., et al. 2005. Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters Science 309(5737):1036-1039. Cutter, S.L., et al. 2008. A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters Global Environmental Change 18:598-606. CINRD. 2012. Disaster resilience: a national imperative. Washington: National Academies Press. Liu, J., et al. 2007. Complexity of coupled human and natural systems Science 317(5844): 1513-1516. Machlis, G., et al. 1997. The human ecosystem part I Society and Natural Resources 10(4): 347-367. Norris, F.H., et al. 2008. Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness American Journal of Community Psychology 41: 127-150. Pfefferbaum, R.L., et al. 2013. The Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART): an intervention to build community resilience to disasters Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 19(3): 250-258. Sempier, T.T., et al. 2010. Coastal community resilience index: a community self- assessment. MASGP-08-014. Further information Maxwell.Keely@epa.gov H-05 Human-environment system resilience indicators Community resilience is aided by scientifically informed indicators and metrics that tell us how the human-environment system functions before and after a disaster. In addition to vulnerability and capacity, an ideal suite of indicators would show us: Cultural context. Values, knowledge, and beliefs shape what resilience looks like to people, and how they want to get there. Distribution of populations, hazard risk, infrastructure, natural and cultural resources, and contamination across the landscape. Feedbacks across scales. Political economy, public health, and environmental processes influence vulnerability and resilience. Flows of nutrients, energy, money, social capital, people, and information. Health of community residents and ecosystems. Power. A community’s social networks and institutions are embedded in broader power relations. Process. Measures community institutions take to improve adaptive capacity and disaster planning. Property rights. Disasters may alter infrastructure ownership and resource access. System resilience properties. Redundancy, diversity, connectivity, modularity, adaptive capacity, agency, non-brittleness. To avoid indicator bloat and operationalize resilience, communities should initiate a participatory process to define resilience endpoints. A community that prioritizes getting people back to work would select indicators to show: Labor Wages, unemployment rates, job satisfaction, commute Household Income, access to cash, time Disaster planning Business continuity, employee support, participation Health Identity, role function, stress Cross-scale interactions Market demand, supply chains, migration, state and federal policy Social capital Volunteering, clean-up Return to social function Housing, business, transportation, childcare, electricity, water/waste, natural resources